Monitoring Student Attendance using a Smart System at Taif University

The university system in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is concerned with student attendance for lectures, and it is the responsibility of lecturers to monitor student attendance for each lecture. By the end of the semester, students get an attendance register indicating which lectures the student has attended and it reports the calculated percentage for each student’s attendance in each course. Universities have regulated the mechanisms and the acceptable percentages of student absence. The process for a lecturer to manually check student attendance consumes a lot of time and effort, either during the lecture or when in the process of emptying absenteeism and inserting it into the university’s electronic system. Therefore, Saudi universities compete to find modern methods of checking student attendance that will avoid the disadvantages of manually taking attendance. For this reason, they have produced electronic attendance systems, for example, using a student's fingerprint, an eye recognition system, or a mobile phone system to read a QR code designed for the same purpose. All of these systems have the disadvantage that they consume a lot of time, as all students have to line up at the fingerprint reader or the eye detector for identification. Therefore, the problem of the consumption of lecture time is still present, even with these modern systems. Therefore, the aim of this research is to propose a smart mobile application that is able to check the attendance of students without having to consume lecture time or require any effort from the lecturer. The system automatically recognizes the attendance of students through their university ID cards. Each lecturer would use his/ her own mobile phone to use the proposed system to check the attendance of students instead of using manual method to register the attendance of students and the students’ ID cards that are detected by coming within range of the lecturer reader would represent present students, and missing student ID cards represent absent students.